What does search engine friendly means?

Search engine optimized means you want to make sure that it’s easy to understand for the search engines, but on top of that you also want it to be user-friendly for persons visiting your website. You want them to find the content that they’re looking for, you have to have substantive content. So the first things you should do is make sure your website is prime for the search engines and the users. Create your about page, services page, features page, contact page, affiliate disclosure page, or any other relevant page to your niche.

The main pages should be identified for your particular type of website and make sure you have those properly formatted, and have the right language on those pages.

They should also be substantive because you want to make sure that you’re providing tremendous value to the users and also something for the search engines to grab onto. Besides your pages, you should also start blogging. Blogging is one of the best ways to get started with your website, it’s a good way for you to generate high-quality content that’s chronologically based. Every blog post you make should have a separator based on categories and tags.

Maybe you already know about all this, maybe you’re brand new to all this but basically it’s how you categorize your website.

If you have a real estate website, maybe you have categories based on selling homes or buying homes. Maybe you have categories for renters and then you can have tags that are a bit more specific or descriptive but basically you create your blog post or your articles and then you’ll categorize it based on the type of article.

How often should you blog?

As often as you possibly can while not sacrificing quality. You want to have substantive content so if that means one blog post a week, then make one blog post per week but make sure it’s informative. Make sure it provides value, you may want to stick within 1000 word minimum to potentially up to 3000 or 4000 words and you might be looking at that number or hearing that number and say that’s an e-book, that is a short book. But in reality, you want to make sure that you’re providing the type of value to your users and again something for the search engines to grab onto. It’s been shown time and time again that the more substantive information, the better the chance of your articles making it to page one on search engines.

How long does it take to get to page one?

That takes time, it’s not going to happen overnight especially for a brand new website. But if you do your job right, it can get there within a matter of months, sometimes faster if you’re generating the type of content that gets shared a lot and that means you have to have your articles and your blog posts and your pages ready to share on social media. What that really means is the social share icons either on the side or the bottom or the top of the website or web page itself make it easy for people to share your content with their followers and their subscribers and their network on other social sites.

If you’re gonna be a blogger, maybe a daily blogger, that means you’re creating a lot of content and even then, that just means maybe 365 articles per year. If you’re doing this, you’re gonna want to make sure that your blog post are highly categorized and sticking to within about five to ten categories very specific towards specific niche or specific segment of your niche.

Building a List

You don’t want to just create the content, you also want to make it easy for you to generate leads or generate connections and you can do that with your email list, your contact page, or maybe a pop-up form. If a person is looking to exit your website, have an exit intent type pop-up where it asks them to subscribe to your website or maybe it asks him to share your article somewhere on social media.

Developing your list is one of the main things you should focus on with your website because the power and the money is within the list especially in the early days where you’re not gonna be found on page one of the search engines. You want to grab as many contacts as you can, so that way you can send them any new articles. The key thing is that you should not spam people, you don’t want to send them more than one email maybe a week. You’re writing one article a week then perfect, if you’re writing more than one article, then maybe send them one email in the middle of the week and when at the end with a recap of all your articles you’ve written.

Website Security and Site Speed

You also need to make sure your website is secure. Fortunately with platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, there’s security plugins or modules that you can utilize to secure your website. You also want to make sure that your websites optimized this includes the images on your website this includes the cache chain of your pages and your files that you utilize on your site

Why does cache or optimization matter?

Because speed matters and page load time matters. It is a search engine ranking factor and Google has made it known that they want websites load fast since people are viewing your website most likely on a mobile device right now. 4G/LTE is prevalent but 5G is right around the corner. That being said, the faster your website loads, the better it will perform potentially within the search engines. I say potentially because there are over 200 plus ranking factors that Google and other search engines use when determining what pages will make it to the top 10 list in the search engines or the top 10 links on the first page. The more content you create, the better chance you have of making it on the top 10 or on page one. In reality, not many people go to page 2 and even fewer people go to page 3, Content is still king and always will be.

Website Promotion and Branding

So you have your website, you’re creating great content, you have your pages set up, you’re optimizing your website, you’re securing your website.

What else can you do? Market your website, you have to make sure you’re emailing people. As I mentioned, you have to make sure that you make it easy for people to share your articles with their networks but also to connect with you on your networks. You want to build a community. You want to build a following, you want to have people coming back to your website. Seeing your website as a vital resource for the niche or for the type of content that you’re creating, you also want to have good call to actions on your website because the purpose of your website is to generate some type of leads or some type of interaction. So make sure you have call to action either in the sidebars, on the front page of your website, or in pop-ups or some type of widget sized area on your site. Call to actions are very important to have and in the beginning. Don’t be afraid to play around with your website in the beginning, it is the best time because most people don’t know about your site, the search engines most likely are not ranking your site, so it’s the best time to experiment and make mistakes and fix them fast.

Website Appearance is Everything

Make sure you’re using the right colors and a not so distracting font for your site. You may want to consider doing some AB testing, you may want to create some landing pages that are very narrow and focused on the type of information you want present at that point in time. Most often to create a call to action or to convert someone to do a specific task.

Categorize and tag your articles, make sure they’re following a specific format. Try to see how you can experiment and keep people on your website by providing them additional information that’s relevant to the search that got them to your site,

Build it and they will come

That is a quote that you’ve heard in the past that if you build something, people will naturally come to it. Well that’s definitely not true when it comes to the web, there are billions of websites on the internet right now, there are millions of articles being ran on a daily basis. Find a way to stand out you have to find a way to get your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible and this is gonna take work .

This is not something like you can set it and forget it, that does not exist. Anyone who tells you it exist, is telling you something wrong. What you need for a functional website and for an effective website is a lot of high-quality substantive content that’s shareable and leads to generating the types of conversions you want. You need to build your email list, you need to make sure that you’re getting people to come back and return to your site. So building and they will come is not true when it comes to websites, you gotta build it and you gotta build it properly, you got to design it properly and then, have to market it like crazy. You certainly need to get it in front of as many people as possible. You have to share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and others. Create your Facebook pages and groups and things of that nature, you have to share it on Instagram and you can actually generate traffic from Instagram, it’s a bit harder but you can do it. More importantly, you have to focus on search engine optimization, social media marketing, and on conversion rate optimisation.